I've been a developer for over 2 decades and I've been using AI in our react codebase for the past 3 months. Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast.

I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.

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beachy 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've been writing code for 50 years and it looks now that we have seen sunrise and are about to see sunset on humans writing code by hand.

Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.

Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.

This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".

A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.

	▲	slopinthebag 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is so context-dependent. Coding some generic crud app is indeed becoming more automated, but most of the stuff I end up building is just way outside the capabilities of current LLMs to accomplish without significant steering and gasps hand written code. Most of the stuff LLMs are good at ones hotting are the same things a non-coder could build with no-code platforms anyways. Which is great imo, it means we can utilise our skills and expertise on stuff that is more "cutting edge".

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is impressive but this same sea-change happened at least twice before - the era when computers went from being rooms full of women(354) to machines programmed in machine language(892) to those with screens, keyboards and even assemblers (assembly language, especially macro assemblers, were considered seriously high level at a time), to mid-level languages like C (considered needlessly complex and slow at one time, now considered barely above a macro assembler), to high-level languages like Java and even higher ones (arguably) like Rust.

Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.

354: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

892: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

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zaptheimpaler 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The Olde Days were custom code for a business doing business things (only they could afford a computer, and some universities), then there was a Cambrian explosion of software sold by individuals or small developers to many (80s and 90s), then we've moved to large companies and SaaS.

I think we're about to cycle back to "custom code" except now it's for everyone, by AI - you don't need to find the to-do app of your dreams; you can code one for yourself in a fever-dream.

The era of "write Wolfenstein 3D in a few months and make millions" are gone, but they've been gone a long time already.

	▲	rapnie 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Or - there was a HN discussion on this half year or so ago - there's consolidation again, and there will be AI, but no code. Domain expert talks to the AI, perhaps with an expertised intermediary. AI spins up a whole new 'software platform' for the customer.. internally. Offers all the UI that is needed to work with it.. still 'in the cloud' i.e. in AI data centers. Customer happy, devs less happy.

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throw310822 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI isn't a technology that replaces programmers, it's a technology that replaces generic human beings. The manager of your agents will be an agent, too.

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operatingthetan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the real question is which of the four roles is going to be the one that takes over. Probably people who were already UX-Engineers.

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only-one1701 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I would ask this: which is the worse failure mode —- design not quite right, or users can’t access the app?

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girvo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the other hand, teaching taste is quite hard, and is what people respond to and what designers learn.

Teaching programming is a bit of mostly solved problem, today anyway.

	▲	operatingthetan 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Realistically this doesn't mean all pure designers go away. Large orgs can have a small team that set the overall style guide and designs important pages, and the rest of the org just follows using AI to iterate.

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esafak an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the kind of question you will have to ask if you don't hire right. I get collapsing frontend/backend and PM/UI/UX but two then collapse code and product may be a bridge too far.

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troupo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast.

I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second